Google Labs are experimenting with not only allowing you to see the places you are going to visit on a map, but also giving access to tours of those areas.

City Tours is a new feature that presents the user with predefined tours around specific areas. If you happen to be going to New York, for example, you can access a tour encompassing ten locations with a walk time of around an hour (not including spending time at those locations). Better yet, City Tours offers you multiple tours to do on different days ensuring you get access to all the main tourist attractions without the hassle of planning it out yourself.

The benefits of City Tours don’t stop at predefined tour routes, however. Usually you can only get guide books and tour information for the most popular tourist locations. What if you are visiting a less popular location? With City Tours there may be information available for that location as anyone can suggest places to visit anywhere in the world.

City Tours is also customizable so you can specify specific dates you will be somewhere and then remove places from a suggested tour you don’t want to visit.

As City Tours is a new addition there is a lack of information and some of the tours it suggests can encompass destinations or walk times that aren’t acceptable to you. That should hopefully change as the feature matures.

Matthew’s Opinion
This is another one of those obvious, but I didn’t think of it, additions to Google’s mapping service. You have a map of the world in ever-growing detail, so why not start offering additional information about places to visit and make tours for different places? It makes sense, but could result in reduced guide book sales and a few tour guides looking for new jobs.

The tours on offer are in need of some work. I looked at a tour of Amsterdam and a lot of the suggested places were hotels, which gives you an example of what needs doing. As you can suggest places to visit the tours should get better fairly rapidly, but that does depend on how the tours are updated by Google.

There’s clearly some revenue streams that could come from this service. Tourist attractions could pay Google to feature prominently in tours, promotions could be done to attract people to a location on a tour, and additional services could be offered alongside the tour e.g. car rental, a tour guide etc.